You're listening to Finding Your It Factor, episode number nine. When it comes to presenting your words matter, but how you deliver them matters far more. I'm sure you've heard this phrase before, but what separates good presenters from exceptional speakers is really quite simple. It's primarily in their message delivery. And today I'm going to share with you exactly where to focus in stepping up your game. So here we go.
Have you ever wondered how some people just seem to have a way with words? They have this spark that lights you up when you're near them. They have the it factor. And while most people think it's something that only a few are born with, I believe that you can find it so it can become your super power to grow your business. It's about you bringing your brand to life by becoming a magnetic communicator in person and on camera, showing up with confidence, authenticity, and inspiration. So. Are you ready to become magnetic? I thought so. I'm Heather Sager and I'd like to welcome you to Finding Your It Factor. Well, welcome back to another episode of Finding Your It
Factor. Oh, I can't believe we are well into two months in our time together. And it is, it's about time that we've gotten to the topic at hand today. And that's about our communication skills specifically the things we do that are not the words we say. There probably was a better way to say that. But you know what I'm talking about, right? Today we're talking about body language. We're talking about tone, we're talking about intonation, we're talking about how we actually deliver our message, both in our vocal tone, but more importantly what we say when we're not speaking. Now, I talked about this a little bit last week when I talked about my experiences at Amy Porterfield's event, the entrepreneur experience, and I recognized how the speakers held themselves together during the Q and A talk. So by the way, that was just a really good episode.
Go back and listen to episode number eight if you want to dive in a little bit more into one that event, but two specifically some takeaways around how to leverage Q and A as a strategy in your next presentation. Um, but relative today's conversation, I want to talk about how we spend so much time focused on the words we say but really where we should be putting our energy is in our delivery. And this is a, I think a big miss for so many of us. Um, over the years I've built a lot of presentations and I've helped a lot of others do the same. And time and time again, what happens is when people are ready to create their presentation, they sit down at the computer and they open up PowerPoint or keynote and uh, they pull up an old presentation they had and then they start copying and pasting or creating over the top of the existing slide deck and just start jamming in content and information on what they want to present.
I bet that sounds a little bit familiar. Well, first of all, we can talk about that as not the best way to create a presentation. Uh, but that's a topic for another day. But what typically happens is people massage their PowerPoint or keynote and they get all the right words on screen and they want to put some sexy little pictures in it. So they go to Google and they copy the images over. Side note, you probably shouldn't do that. Uh, but what they do is they get everything just right for the actual slide deck. And then for a moment they might consider what they're going to say. And if they're really, really great, they might even say those words out loud, but the odds of someone actually standing up and practicing what every little thing on their body is going to do during a talk. Meaning how are their feet going to be?
What's their stance feel like? How are their shoulders set back? Um, are they gonna use their hands? What kind of clothes are they wearing? Are they going to have restrictions when it comes to a dress being too tight in the shoulders or a jacket, not allowing you to use your arms all the way? Do you actually get up and embody everything you would if you were really truly in front of a live audience? And I bet the answer is no. Nope. Maybe there's some exceptions where you have a really important thing coming up and you practice this a little bit more. But usually those moments are few and far between. And what I want to talk about with you today is around becoming more intentional with your delivery skills. Now, I want to just out of the gate talk to you about what your delivery skills are.
So I teach something called the delivery core four. So want to introduce to you these four specific things that you need to be aware of when it comes to delivering information to your audience. And this comes to play no matter if you're giving a presentation on a stage or your speaking up in a meeting or you're having coffee with a friend, we are always communicating. So real quick, let me actually just clarify what communication looks like. In research done at the University of California back in the 70s by professor Albert Hebron, Matt Hadrian mob. Robyn, I don't know how to pronounce that, but his name sounds fancy. You can get a link to this on my blog on Heathersager.com but there was a study done around verbal and nonverbal communication and it's often referred to as the 7%, 38% and 55% rule. And what it says is when it comes to communication, particularly those that involve feelings or emotions, which oftentimes sales presentations or any kind of presentation, uh, we are, we are evoking emotion out of people.
So this falls true in here, but anytime we're communicating, when it comes to how we communicate, there's three specific facets. One is our words, two is how we deliver those words. And three is our non verbal communication, i.e. Our body language and people are surprised typically to find out that the mixture between those three. So imagine for a moment those, those three things were a pie chart and we broke them into three. How those lay out is pretty surprising. 38% of what you communicate is your tone. 7% is your words. It's only 7%, which obviously let's do some math there. The remaining percentage is 55% is your body language. So that means a couple things. One, that means that over half of everything that you say you're saying by not saying anything at all, you're saying it with your eyebrow raise. You're saying it with the pursed lips, you're saying it with the, with the rounded slumped shoulders.
You're saying that with the crossed arms or your um, your feet and your hips oriented away from a person, all the things that we're doing with our body are telling the person in front of us something. The question is, is it the thing that we want to be saying? Because oftentimes what we're communicating with our body is not intentional. We're not really thinking about it. Um, so that also means that we are communicating all of the time. So even when we're not communicating, we're communicating. Now again, I talked about this last week when Amy was listening in the Q and a that she was communicating so much in those moments. She wasn't speaking. And the same goes true for you. So when you're on client calls and you're asking questions of your client or prospect calls, when you ask a question? How you sit there and receive that information that's communicating something to the other person when you're at coffee with a friend or having dinner with your family, how your, how you're sitting in your chair.
Uh, how your shoulders look. If you look relaxed or you look tired. Uh, if you're actually making eye contact with your kids and when you're asking them about their day, even when, I guess you were talking in that moment, but maybe they're answering you after you ask them about their day. Every moment we are communicating like it or not. So once you become more aware and take ownership of the fact that you're always saying something, even when you're not, you can begin to do something about it to make sure that what you're saying in this world is what you want others to hear. Now that was a slightly metaphorical, I meant that what you're saying through your body language is what you want people to air quote hear, what you want them to see, what you want him to read and pick up. So it's really important to be mindful around how important your delivery is.
So that leads me back to, I want to share with you the delivery core four, because there are four specific things that I want you to be very mindful when it comes to your communication and you can focus on all four of these things each and every day in your business. These are not things that you should save time and energy to practice for a stage presentation. No, no, no. You should be practicing these things every single day and you can do this by sitting in your office a while you're on your computer. You can do this when you go to the grocery store and talk to the person at the counter. You can do this. When you pass a stranger on the street, on your morning walk, you can do this. When you are a, again, having coffee with a coworker, um, or a team member, you, you can practice these things in every live human interaction and you should practice it alone, too.
Because let me just tell you, I was completely unaware of the fact that I had a resting, not so nice person face for years. And I had to practice in the mirror to try to figure out what the problem was so didn't seem so not so nice personey, uh, so sometimes, um, becoming more aware of our facial expressions is best done in private, but for a lot of these other things, you can practice this actually on another person. Okay, so shall we dive in? The delivery core four number one? Intonation. So this is where warm than empathy lie. This is where you actually tell somebody that you care what they're seeing through your voice. Your intonation is the inflection. It's your pace, it's your pitch. It's all of the things that you hear me doing on this show with my voice. It's when I pause to give you a moment to let something sink in.
It's when I get a little quicker in my voice and get excited, maybe a little louder to make you feel like something important is happening. All of that is intonation and it's important for us to have a varied level of um, vocal abilities because it makes it more interesting for people to listen and pay attention to us. This is an incredible opportunity for you to get better using your voice. Now how? Let me give you my real great trick here. So we have two little kids at home. I've told you about them before. Owen is four and a half and we do story time every single night. Now, to be fair, my husband and I trade off, so he does one night I do the other, and on the off nights we put the baby down. So we have a few minutes of quiet time to ourself, um, after the kids go to bed.
By the way, this is going to sound terrible, but my favorite nights are the night I put the baby down because I put the baby down and he goes right down and then I get to go downstairs, make a big bowl of popcorn, and uh, I get a minute by myself and it's wonderful. Not the point of this story. So let's get back to it with, uh, my kids bedtime. We read books out loud and it is so fun to read a child stories because you can use these really crazy voices. You also can get really dramatic with your voice and use volume and pitch very interestingly. You also can get excited and practice your pace and your slow moving voice. Yeah, I have some really good voices by the way, that I do. Although my child says that my superheroes are not as good as daddy's. Uh, but still, I really get to practice using different, um, how do I say this different ranges of my voice that I wouldn't use on a normal basis?
And I've actually found that it's made me a much better vocal communicator. So if you have little kids at home, this might be a really good way for you to practice, uh, leveraging areas of your vocal abilities that you haven't tapped into. And then think for a moment how you might bring some of those from story time into conversations in your business. Delivery Core four number two, facial expressions. I know I mentioned this before, the rest of the not so nice person face, you know it by another name. But how we hold our faces says so much about how interested we are in the person in front of us. We know that eye contact is something that's very important. Ah, too much eye contact though can be a little creepy. You feel like somebody is just boring down into your soul so you don't want too much eye contact.
Um, but avoidance of eye contact, we have a tendency to distrust the person in front of us. So facial expressions is something that you really want to be mindful of. A couple of things to think about. One, um, you want to make sure that you're not overly, uh, smiling over a, over accommodating. Uh, I worked with someone for years who had a tendency to smile because she was trying to avoid the resting not so nice person faced. So she smiled in conversations for their eyebrows rates all the time. And you were really confused why she was so surprised and happy when you were talking about something so not. I don't know if you could tell it my voice, but it was totally raising my eyebrows and smiling and really awkwardly because I didn't understand what was happening. I imagine that somewhere along the way somebody had told her or she had read somewhere, that she should have a pleasant expression on her face all the time.
And I don't say this to make fun of her or belittle her by any means. I'm not meaning this as a mean thing. But what I'm saying is sometimes we read something somewhere and we take the information quite literally. So let me translate this for you. You need to have a smile on your face when appropriate. You should have a pleasant look on your face if you're trying to be pleasant with other people. If you're talking about a topic that's far more serious or pensive or thoughtful, a smile is probably not the appropriate route to go. So this is where you want to start thinking about how do you want to make the other person feel in that moment. Do you want them to feel empathy? Do you want them to feel understood? Do you want them to feel um, acceptance or patience or excitement or enthusiasm?
You have to think about how do you want this person to feel and then ask yourself, how can I make my face show that? I bet you're pretty smart and you know the answer to that. So just connect the dots there, but practice different facial expressions to see what your listening face looks like. See what your speaking face looks like. I know it's super scary, but have you looked at yourself on video? Yeah. You watch and see, okay, so how do I, how do I look when I talk? I found out, I talk kind of out of one side of my mouth, which is a little strange, but I can't really fix it. I also noticed that I tend to, um, I tend to look in a very specific spot every time I get on camera. So for years I had to work with that.
Um, so you just start noticing what your natural tendencies are and once you identify them, if you're not happy with what they're, what you're doing, you can change them. So, uh, I did want to circle back and say, I forgot to mention eye contact. A big question I get a lot from people is Heather, how much eye contact is too much eye contact. And a few years ago I read a book by Tanya Ryman. I'll link to this in my show notes. She's an incredible friend of mine, a speaker I booked two years ago and we've stayed in touch. She's a body language expert. And uh, in her book she talks about that the magic recipe for eye contact is about 70% of the time. So when you're giving a presentation or just in daily conversations, about 70% of the time you want to maintain eye contact with that healthy 30% of look elsewhere.
Just naturally let your eyes go where they go. Whether you look down or up or over to the side. Just be mindful of where you're looking. So if you're looking at your watch, not a good way to build trust. If you're looking at the door at a networking event, not a good way to show somebody that you care about what they're saying. If you keep looking at your phone or a computer screen, again, that's not giving the right impression, but just naturally letting your eyes wander where they need to wander is perfectly acceptable. You should not stare somebody down in their eyeballs 100% of the time. All right. Delivery Core Four number three: hand gestures and your posture. So I want you to think for a second where I'm talking about here is from your neck all the way down to your trunk. So about down to your hips and that whole area here.
This is the next area of the delivery core four. So we're talking about, uh, your shoulders and your posture, talking about your hand gestures, how you use your hand, when your hands, when you speak, how you use your hands when you're not speaking. And then we're also talking about the orientation of that torso. So let me give you a couple of different examples here. So if you are doing a video, let's say you are using your webcam or a on a tripod camera and you're shooting a video, you want to make sure that you're using your hands naturally in front of you. Don't try to hide your hands under a table, use your hands naturally. There was a really powerful Ted talk done by Vanessa van Edwards. She talks about this idea that we're all infectious. I'll link to it in the show notes. It's an incredible Ted talk.
But she did a study. Her and her team did a study where they, uh, they looked into a ton of different Ted talks and they studied what made some talks way more, more effective or more interesting than other ones. Like, I can't remember the details of it, but she'll talk to you about it in the Ted talk. You totally need to watch it. But the thing that was interesting is the Ted talks that were rated higher, and again, I don't remember what the classification was around that, whether they were more viral or just rated higher quality, I'm not sure. But the thing that they had in common is that they had more hand gestures, which was kind of interesting. You know, I don't know about you, but I hear oftentimes from people that they say, Oh God, I'm a hand talker. My hands, I use them way too much.
And they say that like it's a bad thing and using your hands is not a bad thing. Using your hands is a great thing. You just have to get comfortable and confident and knowing how you use your hands because they are a powerful tool that can help you communicate your message. You can indicate, uh, when something is a big deal versus when something's maybe not so much. You can show contrast between, between things by showing your left hand versus your right hand, your hand gestures give you the ability to create openness and vulnerability with your audience or you can create power, the definitiveness. The difference between those two things is openness and empathy and vulnerability. That's palms up versus power and assertiveness is more palms down. So there's different things that you can do between those things. And I actually have a video specifically on hand gestures.
I talk about how to get more comfortable with your hands, number one, and then number two, seven power moves you can use in your presentations. So if you're interested in those videos, um, by the way, I also have quite a few other videos on YouTube. You can check them out. Um, my YouTube handle, I'll put all of that link in the show notes along with these direct videos. But those might be really helpful for you because sometimes seeing examples of what that looks like so you can actually practice, might be a more powerful way, a clear way for you to get this message. Moving into delivery core four number four. Our last one here. This one is movement. And specifically what I mean by this is thinking about our body, right? So we've covered our, um, we've covered our face. We've covered our neck, down to our waist.
This is waist and below. So it's how you're moving your legs, how you're walking. Uh, if you're sitted how you're sitting, are you crossing your legs, not crossing your legs? Uh, if you're standing at a reception or a cocktail hour, how are your feet oriented with the person in front of you? All of these things indicate whether or not somebody has our time and attention whether or not we are nervous or open. when we're giving a presentation. Uh, if we're pacing back and forth without ever stopping, that can be a little distracting. It can also give our audience the impression that we're nervous or scattered or unfocused. So understanding how you move, how you move specifically your legs and your feet in conversations and presentations can become a very powerful way for you to show authority. Because confident speakers are able to hold themselves in a single position and just speak. No, I don't mean you should just stand at the center of stage and deliver your speech.
That's not what I mean at all. What I mean is you should be able to stand there and be present with your audience to deliver your message and then take a few steps, walk across the stage or to the middle and then be able to stand there and be present with your audience. And something beautiful happens when we slow down every once in a while and just allow people to get present with us and our words and our pace. It. It's calming. It has a calming effect on your audience. It has a powerful effect with your audience. Similar to the power of the pause. So when you are thinking about speaking to an audience like in front of a live audience, do not underestimate the power of standing up and practicing your feet. How comfortable are you are in your shoes? How do you move across the stage?
How do you ensure the people on the right side of the room get enough love as the people on the left side of the room, but just becoming more intentional and aware of how you move your body can really make a difference. Now, I'll say this, if you're just getting started speaking in front of an audience, that tip there might seem extremely advanced or it may seem extremely simple. I don't know. That's up for you to decide, but what I will tell you is subtle, tiny little nugget changes in these areas can make an incredible difference because remember, it's all these things we just talked about. Your movement, your hand gestures, your posture, your facial expressions, and then how you say your words the dynamics of your voice. Those things all together make up 93% of your message. So do not spend 99% of your time obsessing over the words you're going to say. Spend time on it.
100% yes, spend time on the words because the wrong words will undermine everything, but the right words aren't enough. They're not even close to enough. When it comes to showing up for your audience and delivering the message that you have in your head and in your heart, you have to bring the soul, you have to bring the fire, you got to bring the heat baby, and you do that through the delivery core four. So I want to challenge you to put these into practice. I want you to think about what's the one area that you really, really need to focus on this week. And that could be getting better with your tone, slowing down your pace. Uh, that could be you practicing using your hands this week instead of crossing your arms. Maybe you want to practice, uh, not pacing. When you speak, come on you to pick one thing that you're going to work on.
Just one. Don't you try to tackle all of these because you're not going to be setting yourself up for success, but pick one thing that you could tackle when it comes to your delivery. And I want you to have a little bit accountability and I want you to shout this out. I want you to post it on Instagram stories and tag me @theheathersager and let me know what is the thing you're tackling this week and how is this working for you. And of course, of course go check out the videos over on YouTube. I think you'll love some of the ones that you can actually see the facial expressions and the hand gestures and all that other goodness. So this is just scratching the surface when it comes to delivery. And this is one facet of you creating a more dynamic and magnetic presentation, but also just in our daily lives and daily work becoming more magnetic with the people that you talk to.
And if today's episode, it's a shorter one, if it resonated with you, maybe you have a couple extra minutes in your day. It is time my friend to leave a review. We've been at this now for eight weeks. I think we're starting to get our groove, you and I together and I'm hoping that what you're hearing on this podcast, on this show is creating value in your life or it's adding to how you show up for your audiences and through your future prospects. So if it has made a difference for you in your life and in your business, would you please let me know and put a review, not just a five star rating though I would love that. I would love to hear your comments. So please tell me how are we doing here? What would you like to see more of? And a, that's going to be the best way for other people to find the show, too. So thanks for joining me here today guys. It was I think, a fun conversation. It's one of my favorite topics. I hope you enjoyed it too. And uh, Hey, I'll catch you next week. Same time, same place.
[inaudible] guys, thanks so much for listening to Finding Your It Factor and Hey, if you have a talk coming up, you have to check out my free resource. It's called Nail Your Next Talk: 10 must ask questions before taking the stage so you can show up as an authority and turn that talk into future business. These are the questions that I use myself to prepare for my live talks, and they're going to help you ask the right questions of the person who booked you for the event. So the meeting planner or the client, and it's going to help you serve your audience to the best way possible. It's going to help you anticipate potential tech or AV snags. Turn the Q and A time into a strategic place for content and make this speaking opportunity, a lead generator for your business. So go get it now. What are you waiting for? It's over at heathersager.com/10questions [inaudible].